Shortened time to design and user error reduction are essential to the success of application development environments. Current application development environments are geared towards system engineers. System engineers often need to monitor the values of important system variables when developing an embedded application. System variables may include, for example, input, output, and configurable variables defining the system behavior. The values of the system variables are generally stored in a memory and can be accessed by a user. Conventional application development techniques generally do not provide a clear visual map of system variable locations in the memory and generally do not offer efficient tools for the access of the system variables. In particular, when a user wishes to retrieve the system variables that are not located in contiguous memory locations, the user would typically have to calculate and provide a memory address for each of these system variables. Similarly, a user wishing to change or update the system variables in the application would have great difficulty in doing so. A user may need to hand code in assembly or C code in order to access the system variables. Such an approach may be too low level for system designers. Thus, conventional approach is inflexible, inefficient, and error prone.